Win PE hangs at startup of easyDriveLetter

I downloaded WinBuilder 2015 yesterday and created a boot disk as described in the tutorials. This all worked out very well - thank for the great tool! I added 7ZipPortable and CPUZ as plugins.

Now after burning the ISO on a CD-ROM and booting from there, Win PE starts to boot as expected, but then hangs with the following screen:

There is nothing I can do in this situation, there is no mouse pointer on the screen and pressing any keys on the keyboard (i tried at least ESC, Space, Enter, Backspace, Alt + F4) don't do the trick. Any idea what to do?

There are two harddisks in my computer, but they may both be broken (which is why I try to run Win PE). Could there be an issue with easyDriveLetter if not any drive was found?

Check the contents of the easyDriveLetter.ini, maybe the issue is with some other commands in it.

But AFAIK/AFAICR the use of easydriveletter.exe is optional, it is only a way to make sure that the "boot media" gets the Y: drive letter for "consistency" across different possible boot scenario's, if needed you can disable it.

And yes, if there are hard disks that failed it is entirely possible that the Mount Manager gets "confused", a typical example would be a disk drive in "LBA0" or "BSY" state, usually any Windows NT cannot boot with a device in that state connected directly to the motherboard (while they may allow booting if connected through - say - a USB adapter/enclosure), but it should be still understandable in BIOS if this is the case (disk in BSY state will be not detected, disk in LBA0 will be detected but show 0 LBA) you'd better use a DOS based tool like the UBCD:

I downloaded WinBuilder 2015 yesterday and created a boot disk as described in the tutorials. This all worked out very well - thank for the great tool! I added 7ZipPortable and CPUZ as plugins.

Now after burning the ISO on a CD-ROM and booting from there, Win PE starts to boot as expected, but then hangs with the following screen:

There is nothing I can do in this situation, there is no mouse pointer on the screen and pressing any keys on the keyboard (i tried at least ESC, Space, Enter, Backspace, Alt + F4) don't do the trick. Any idea what to do?

There are two harddisks in my computer, but they may both be broken (which is why I try to run Win PE). Could there be an issue with easyDriveLetter if not any drive was found?

Thanks and cheers,

dmr

I do not know why there is no reaction on pressing the "return" key. On the other hand, I sometimes have to press it twice, in very seldom cases even three times.

The "Display Problem" message is a fault of mine. This message appears also on other troubles (fixed).

The question concerning your problematic harddisks: I do not know. Of course I cannot reproduce your HW configuration. But I made a software change to tell the user something about PE booting.

Download the new WinBuilder version and unzip into your existing WinBuilder directory (<BaseDir>)

Delete <BaseDir>\lib\corefiles\Win7PE.*

Start WinBuilder

Config core win7pe

Set "Boot Debug" to True and click "Save Changes" at bottom.

Build the PE and run it. During boot easyDriveLetter tells something about what it is doing.

Maybe here we get an error report.

You can duplicate the log output to winbuilder.log by the

Command FILELOG ON (OFF).

To continue, you have still to "Click Return". I hope, only one times.

BTW: Wonko is a bit wrong. easyDriveLetter.exe is fundamental for this PE and cannot be omitted. Also easyDriveLetter.ini must not be changed.

BTW2: You should set "Boot Debug" to "False" when the issue is solved.

BTW: Wonko is a bit wrong. easyDriveLetter.exe is fundamental for this PE and cannot be omitted. Also easyDriveLetter.ini must not be changed.

Good to know .I had the false impression that someone may not want to have the Y: drive letter. Maybe the name might need to be changed from "easyDriveLetter.exe" to "forcedtoYDriveLetter.exe" to better reflect what the tool does.

Primarily easyDriveLetter was written to give "known" letters to the HDs, using paraglider's RemapDrives tool.Later easyDriveLetter has been extended to "... that someone may not want to have the Y: drive letter"Later it has been extended to install drivers.Later it has been extended to start applications.Later ...

You are right, I should think about renaming, but to what?

I don't know about the .exe, but for the .ini WINPESHL20xx.INI would be nice.

To make clear: easyDriveLetter is not part of WinBuilder 20xx. It is included in my implementation of building a Win7PE.

Yep, I understand that , but I don't think that the final user is likely to be confused by the overwhelming number of projects available to build other versions of a Windows PE 3.x[1] with Winbuilder 2013 (or 2015, or 20xx, anyway not the old Billy-Bob, but the new Billy-Bob)

Wonko

[1]as the Win7PE name is actually confusing between the old and new projects.